NJ Transit is the first public transportation agency to partner with Google Wallet, allowing customers to wave their smart phones in front of a sensor to pay and sparing them the hassle of fishing for cash or credit cards.

The “contactless payment” options are available at New York Penn Station ticket vending machines and windows, at the Newark Liberty International Airport Rail Station (AirTrain), on bus routes 6, 43, 80, 81, 87 and 120 and on some buses on the 126 line, NJ Transit announced today.

While I wait, wait, wait for my over the air update from Sprint that will install Google Wallet on my Nexus S, I have time to list two things that really need to happen before I actually leave my wallet at home (as the promo videos insist I will do):

99.99% service – As we continue to evolve from 2G to 4G and beyond, what we really need is a near ubiquitous network that can penetrate buildings and those hardest to reach spots while also scaling across a large stretch of land. It needs to basically be an emergency data network that only needs to handle low-speed data connections. As backup, essentially. For when your mobile carrier can’t give you 6G service. As a long-time Google Voice user, I’ve been left without the ability to text message too many times because I had zero network connectivity. Simple data transactions like GVoice or GWallet will need a much more reliable low-level network.

Solar recharging – I can’t even count how many times it’s happened to me, probably because I’ve been using Android for so long, but battery life is a huge issue if you really want to move a culture to dependency on a single device. Apple gets it. Google needs to address it with their hardware manufacturers. Refine what was done with the Samsung Replenish and make it reliable and standard.